What to expect from your appointment

Your initial consultation may involve a telephone call or a face to face appointment with a clinician or Practitioner. This gives us the opportunity to provide you with information regarding treatment options available and for us to gather all information relevant to your condition and/or treatment, and for you to ask questions.

At your face to face appointment we will conduct an assessment of your skin, discuss your treatment options and provide you with information relevant to your treatment. If your initial appointment is a telephone call this will be done when you attend your first appointment in the department.

As we are a teaching hospital there may be a student present at your consultation with your permission.

You may be asked to have some photographs taken prior to treatment, this is to provide us with accurate visible records of your condition. You will be asked for your permission before the photographs are taken and you will be given a consent form to sign.

We will also ask you to sign a consent form before conducting any treatment. We will provide you with information on the consent form and offer you a copy as well as discussing the choices of treatment with you. If you later change your mind you are entitled to withdraw consent- even after signing.

Following on from this we will then conduct a small test patch and may take further photographs of the treated area this helps us to assess the response of the treated area at your subsequent visits. At your next appointment we will assess the response of the test area if we can see a visible improvement and you have not had any treatment reactions we will deliver your first full treatment to the area agreed at consent.

If we cannot see an improvement in the test area we may need to conduct another test patch or if your initial treatment is practitioner lead we may need to discuss your treatment with a clinician before continuing with further treatment.